Useless Prayers

Eimear McBride’s “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.”

McBride has written a blazingly original novel, conveying her protagonist’s psychic collapse in unflinching prose, fuelled by fractured, adventurous language and raw emotion.Credit Photograph by Philipp Ebeling

Eimear McBride’s first novel, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing” (Coffee House), tells a fall-and-fall story that, especially in a traditional Irish setting, can seem familiar fictional material: a departed father, a pious, abusive mother, an errant and blasphemous daughter, a predatory uncle, a death in the family, a God-soaked household busy with meddling priests and vain prayer. Irish fiction and drama have prospered on their ration of curses, drink, and church: family history of this kind would seem to be the nightmare from which we are happy enough not to be awakened.

“A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing” is indeed conventional in places, but in most respects the novel is blazingly daring. For one thing, all the characters are unnamed, and they inhabit an Ireland shorn of dates and obvious historical specificity. (A reference to Walkmans suggests the nineteen-eighties.) Most strikingly, McBride’s novel is written in a dense, interrupted, shattered language, blooming with neologisms, compounds, stretched senses, old words put to new uses. The novel is narrated by the “half-formed” girl of the title, and begins when she is two years old. So McBride’s prose starts by mimicking the visceral, fractured comprehension of a child taking clumsy possession of an adult world. The girl’s voice is frequently crossed by the voices of adults, as in this description of going to church (the narrator is now five):

Get up from that bed. Come on we’re late. Ah Mammy. It’ll do you no harm Madam to show the Lord you care. But I feel sick at mass. None of that please. There’s no fresh air in there. Get you your shoes on we haven’t got time for this.

Grannies rap their hearts. I know that from hot mass when they say Jesus’s name. My feet hurt, knees hurt on the kneeler where someone’s foot left shoe dirt there—sorry will you let me through. All the people up and down saying Christ has died Christ has risen Christ will come again. Mammy I can’t see the altar. Lift me up til my legs go dead.

It’s a dangerous place for smacking mass. Any trying to run up the aisle. Get back here. Climbing through the seats ahead. Sorry. Sit down. Sucking tissues or getting under the pew. That’s a good thump in the back.

McBride has spoken of the moment, when she was in her mid-twenties, that she first encountered “Ulysses.” She told the Guardian that it was decisive. “Everything I have written before is rubbish, and today is the beginning of something else,” she concluded. She wrote this novel fast, in six months, at the age of twenty-seven, and spent the next nine years trying to get it published. Backdated compensation arrived earlier this year, in the form of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize for Fiction). British reviews have emphasized the novelty of McBride’s style. But to call it a new “style from scratch,” as one did, may be excessive. Apart from the obvious Joycean influence, there is the example of Faulkner, and of Beckett. (“The biddies are having their sup.”) And not a few contemporary writers have bent language, as McBride does, away from formal sense-making and toward private orality: Ali Smith, in “Hotel World”; Peter Carey, in “True History of the Kelly Gang”; Patrick McCabe, in “The Butcher Boy.” What is most original about McBride’s novel is not the style but the use that is made of that style. The perverted uncle and the pious mother may be conventional enough; McBride’s relentless examination of a teen-age girl’s psychic and moral collapse is anything but. When McBride’s prose is most difficult, it is because it is doubly difficult: hard to follow and hard to bear.

Here illness is both in the family and of it. The novel’s narrator addresses her elder brother in the second-person singular. Through a child’s clues and fumbling approximations, we gather that the girl’s brother has had a brain tumor, which appears to be in remission. Surgery has left a scar, and the growth has affected the boy’s vision, speech, and gait. His sister eyes the tumor warily, as if it were a malevolent ghost: “Always in the house, drifting round the stairs or sitting by our puddles little beast in your head. Sleeping happy homed up your brain stem now and fingers only strumming on your bad left side. Don’t you knock your brother’s head. You stumble. Not that bad. And walking into doors a laugh. Is blind eye at side like in eyelid?” At school, the kids ask him how he got his scar, and he says that a knife did it. Although he’s briefly cool—“country boys” are beaten around the head by dads or priests, but usually aren’t attacked by knives—the favor passes, and the teasing begins. Overhearing the taunts and imitations (“He does your voice like a thick tongue”), his sister suffers for him.

At home, the narrator’s mother, a single parent since the departure of her husband, is alternately abusive and tender. Morality is hypocritically stiffened by the rule of the Church. There is much prayer, and visits from charismatic Christians, whom the narrator calls “the holy joes.” When the girl’s maternal grandfather berates his daughter for rearing a child who can’t even recite the Hail Mary, the ashamed mother viciously assaults her son and daughter. Blood flows from the girl’s nose: “Head back gulping the thicky flow.” Throughout these experiences, the narrator observes, gathers, judges. She is wild, unhoused, estranged. Threatened with hellfire, she erupts in her own blasphemous conflagration: “Saying fucker Christ. Into the fields. My bad words best collection. All the things my mother never taught me. . . . I couldn’t bide the loud Do not.”

The narrator, now thirteen, defies “the loud Do not” as loudly as possible: she begins a sexual relationship with her uncle, an affair that she finds both repulsive and satisfying. Armed with new knowledge, she uses her precocious sexual confidence to take revenge on the boys who mock her brother, delighting in their inexperience—“I’ll only touch his tremble cock”—and despising their erotic neediness: “That guzzle and the useless whinging come of them.” Sex is power, defiance, depraved self-harm. McBride’s novel moves briskly, using its interior monologue to compress and frame large changes. Now the girl is leaving home for college, while her brother, always slow at school, gets a job stacking shelves. In the city, away from home, she sees her uncle again, and abases herself by asking him to hurt her. McBride’s prose, superbly alive to the smell and pulse and blood of sex, is courageously unflinching in these passages, and can be painful to read: we participate in a girl’s willed degradation.

Occasionally, the stop-start Joycean intermittence, allied to first-person stream of consciousness, seems an imperfect or even an affected mode for the narration of an entire novel. The eighteen-year-old narrator sounds little different from the five-year-old, for instance. Her tics of not completing her sentences, inverting the syntax, and otherwise mauling grammatical convention can have the odd effect of making her sound like a crazed Irish pirate: “I be new girl. . . . To have to be saying again again where I come from.” Inconsistencies present themselves from time to time. A girl who can produce a phrase like “this healing vast equivocation,” or “But you’ll find other intimations of their special cool” might be assumed to enjoy connecting her phrases into longer units more often than she does—or just saying, “I am the new girl.”

But McBride’s language also justifies its strangeness on every page. Her prose is a visceral throb, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words, freed from the tedious march of sequence, seem to want to merge with one another, as paint and musical notes can. The results are thrilling, and also thrillingly efficient. The language plunges us into the center of experiences that are often raw, unpleasant, frightening, but also vital. When the narrator first has a sexual encounter with her uncle, her body is overwhelmed (“Push it home as far up. In that tight spot”), and her senses, too, are overwhelmed: “And breathing deafing out my ears.” Elsewhere, she watches her brother come up the drive, riding his bicycle: “Then on your blue bike you come breakily up the drive.” The double sense she draws from the adverb “breakily” makes the performance seem ungainly (lots of braking) and a bit perilous (liable to break). Or see what the narrator wrings out of the word “digs,” in the following passage, in which she tells us about her pursuit, in college, of sex at all costs:

Crumbs on the carpets and insects bite my back I don’t care for. Nicer is not what I am after. Fuck me softly fuck me quick is all the same once done to me. And washing in their rusted baths and flushing brown with limescale loos amid the digs of four a.m. before I put my knickers on.

“The digs of four a.m.”—a place, and a state of being, the very pit of the night. There are many wonderful new usages like this, and many new words (or new to me)—“plomp” (“a plomp load of books”), “harlotting,” “forlorning,” “wilter,” “miracling.” Irish writers can sometimes be lured by the treasures of their wordy inheritance into flashy spending, but McBride isn’t just blarneying. On the contrary, she gets her words to work hard for her. When the narrator uses “miracling,” she seems to reach for it in desperation, as if it were the only possible word. Her brother has been hospitalized once more, and she is on the phone to her horrible uncle, who is blandly consoling her, saying that things will be all right. She cries out, to herself, “Can he see all about me patients miracling well?” We think of this kind of effect as modern, or modernist, but it is also ancient. “Let me gulp down some of this red red stuff, for I am famished,” Esau says of the lentils for which he sells his birthright to Jacob (in Robert Alter’s faithful translation). McBride’s prose—“Head back gulping the thicky flow”—is, in marvellous ways, continuous with this visceral tradition.

The narrator is away at college when her brother’s illness returns. There are doctors, the hospital, a priest. As the novel moves steadily toward its inevitable dénouement, the reader perhaps feels the coaxed direction of narrative convention. But, again, the conventional is enriched by the extraordinary passion of the novel, the writer’s direct access to feeling, and the rigor of the language. Eimear McBride’s own brother died of a brain tumor; she has rightly been at pains to emphasize the fictionality of her novelistic account. Yet the force of lament at the novel’s close seems to carry a special authorial impress, remembrance painfully mixed with invention.

The rituals of mortality focus the novel’s blasphemous energies, as the narrator’s hostility toward belief collides with the certainties of the community. At a wake, the narrator creeps upstairs (while downstairs “they’re merging on the fruitcake”) and sits beside the open coffin of her hated grandfather, “the bastard.” The corpse excites impiety: “So Granda. I don’t talk to the dead. So now. That’s strange to see him here. Dead. I could give him a kick if I liked. . . . I could undo his flies for shame.” Late in the novel, the narrator sits at the bedside of her ailing brother. The priest has given him the sacrament of the sick, anointed him with oil and drawn the sign of the cross on his face. The oil is supposed to comfort, and to cleanse the mortal believer of sin. But what is his sin? Less angrily than with her grandfather, but full of heretical decision, she waits until the priest has left the room, and wipes the oil from her brother’s skin. “For what need? You’re more perfect than you were before. I’ll wash your face of sacrament. Let sin to sinner return. Like me—for I know it very well.” She transfers the sin from the sinless to the sinner, from him to her. This is as close as she can get to taking on his illness, to putting herself in his place: a moment of devout reversal that has its own sacramental tenderness. ♦

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007.